Rural Broadband

If my internet connection was a person, I would have gone beyond the “having a stern word” moment and would be dragging them down the stairs into the garden and kicking the shit out of them.

Most of us have something in life that makes us want to unfold a set of collapsible steps, climb on them and scream to anyone who pauses to listen. My subject of choice would be the internet at my house, with BT being a close second and Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs racing home into third place.

Aside from my Ban Ploughing Campaign which would enable me and wet-dishcloth-horse to roam the countryside all year round, I’m going to start a “Stop Exploiting People in Rural Areas by charging them for a Broadband Service which is Frankly Not Fit for Purpose” Campaign. I know it would be a fairly long hashtag but I’m certain I would get one hell of a following.

Paying £20 a month for the privilege of clicking on the Google Chrome icon on my laptop and the Amazon Firestick starting to buffer has always grated on me. How is that fair? How can they expect me to pay the same as someone who has a 17 Mb/s download speed? My landlady has a beautiful holiday house and the only complaint that she ever receives from her guests is that the mobile phone signal is patchy and the broadband is slow. To be fair, if you come on holiday to rural Northumberland, you would think there may be one or two things to do to distract you from the vague mobile phone reception and sloth-like internet speed. And I would like to remind these people that the speed they are experiencing in the posh holiday house is as fast as lightning in comparison to what I experience every day.

The issue at my home is that we are at the very end of the line at the furthest away point from the telephone exchange. Tractor-Driving-Brother has the same problem. He lives a mile south of me and is at the very end of the line from a different exchange. This drives (no pun intended) Tractor-Driving-Brother luminous with rage because the high speed Optic Fibre cable is under the ground less than 6 feet from his house and yet he has no access to it.

In previous years and on numerous occasions, I have argued my case with BT as to why I should pay £20 a month for an internet connection that runs so slowly. But unfortunately all of the call handlers at BT must be brainwashed with the same stupid terminology. I have lost count of the times I have been promised “speeds up to 17Mb/s” which is about as probable as Ryanair winning World’s Best Airline at the 2017 World Airline Awards. I also used to laugh down the telephone when BT rang me to ask if I would like to buy BT vision or super fast broadband and took great delight in telling them my internet speed was 2 Mb/s. They usually backtracked fairly sharply after that, when it dawned on them that the commission cupboard at the Jodhpurs household was well and truly bare.

The last time I tried to get BT to agree to a discount, the idiot gentleman that I was speaking to informed me that the charge for the internet was not based on the amount of internet that I was using, the charge was actually for the speed that my property was receiving. I stabbed several razor sharp pins into my BT Advisor Voo Doo Doll and through gritted my teeth asked him how he felt it was ethically correct to charge me for a service that I could not use to the full, because the speed that I was paying for could not be met? He then reassured me that BT provided the most excellent service for their customers because they get internet priority over other internet providers’ customers. As I knew this was a lie so enormous that it had it’s own HR department, crèche and underground parking; I hung up and rang Sky to see if they would mind providing me with an equally shit internet connection, but at a fraction of the price. Sky was delighted to accept my custom and I asked if they could add a note to my account that simply said “This woman hates BT”.

When we are trying to browse the web, pages with lots of photographs take over a decade to load. You might as well click on what you want to look at and then clean the bathroom while you wait for them to appear in their entirety. In a nutshell, my internet has always been inadequate but lately it has reached absolutely calamitous proportions and I have had to contact my provider a couple of times to see what could be done about it.

Initially Sky told me there was nothing they could do and despite running speed check after speed check they were adamant that my interweb was running to the best of its scrawny ability and sent an Openreach engineer. This gentleman telephoned at 8 o’clock the next day and despite Britney (Not her real name) telling him that she was alone in the house and that her Mum and Dad wouldn’t be back until after 10 o’clock, we had his coffee made and he was set to work by 8.20am. He managed to contain his exasperation at the line being Fibre and he explained that Fibre only works if you are within 1800 metres of the cabinet and we are actually 2300 metres from the cabinet.

He managed to get a reading of 2 Mb/s, shook his head, sucked his teeth and probably silently thanked God that he lived in Newcastle. By the time the second engineer from Openreach came a week later, the internet was crawling so slowly along the line that he couldn’t get a speed reading at all. I sipped my coffee and raised my eyebrows to this piece of information, I would have laughed but was worried that he would think I was deranged.

In truth of course, I’m so prepared for the Openreach engineer telling me that my broadband is rubbish; that his words are literally like water running from a duck’s back. And the Openreach lads are brilliant. They have even written on my account for any internet supplier to see that Fibre Broadband is unsuitable for this property. This means that I can cancel my contract with Sky as they are not providing me with the minimum 2 Mb/s that they promised me.

I rang them and when they said that they couldn’t downgrade me to an ADSL line, they offered me a deal. £10 a month for the broadband, a discount on my line rental and call charges and no termination fees should I find a free internet service with anyone else and wish to move.

And I accepted it; because I hate BT more than I hate my weak, wounded and pathetic internet connection and the people at Sky are nice.

And I hate BT.